Well, the combination of starting Unique Blog Designs, and trying to grow the company has a been a great challenge to say the least. Also, when your life is completely wrapped up in your small business (12+ hours a day, 7 days a week), what is there to talk about on our personal blogs (LOL)?

Okay, okay… you are probably saying that coming from someone who runs a blogging company, not finding the time to blog on his personal blog is a LAME excuse… YOU’RE CORRECT!

In the coming months, we are launching some exciting new services and products from UBD and I want to make sure you can find out about what is going on inside UBD, and give you some insight into the day to day of what we are doing to market our company and what I research and learn on a daily basis.

My blog, Matt’s blog and Nate’s blog are going to be taking on the responsibility of trying to reach out to people and give back to the blogosphere valuable and useful information previously not shared.

So please keep the faith and look out for the re-launch of our blogs and for updates on what we are launching in order to reach more people.

Thats right, GM is blogging.
Make your way over to GMnext.com, you will find articles written by executives, proper use of podcasts and other forms of new media. To me, this cements the value in using blogs as a way to market your business, small or large.Late last night (or early this mourning at 2am) Nate, Matt, and I were discussing different markets and how they could use blogs and in what way. We all agree that small to medium sized businesses are among those who could benefit the most from blogging.

Why?
All small businesses need a website (at least in my opinion ) The only problem is most small businesses are working with a relatively small budget. Well, as most of you know, to get a decent website designed these days costs at least $5,000 big ones.A blog can be a far less expensive alternative that benefits from higher search engine rankings in most cases. Also, because a blog is based on some sort of content management system, preferably Wordpress, a blog can be easier to update and modify.Having a great design and useful content on your blog can also convey trust and can encourage visitors to become evangelists for you and your brand.

So What Now?
In the coming years it is likely that more and more of the population will understand how valuable a blog actually can be; a powerful marketing and branding tool, a way to develop a community around your brand, a highly search engine optimized web site, relatively inexpensive, and of course they are easy to update and modify.Seeing the companies with big market research budgets do it first, is just one of the first “clues” blogging is here to stay.

 http://cgi.money.cnn.com/tools/millionaire/millionaire.html  

I have mentioned these sorts of financial tools often on my blog and so I thought it was good and time to give you guys a link.
Take a look and see when you will be a Millionaire. Enjoy!

Sure Zuck is not the polished CEO of Goldman, nor does he have the experience of Buffet, but he at least deserves some respect, right? I mean the guy is 23 and is one of the founders of a company valued by Microsoft at $15 billion. Thats on par with Ford Motor Company. Simply incredible, in my opinion.

In this interview on 60 Minutes, he answers a couple of tough questions, one in particular regarding Beacon, Facebook’s latest monetization attempt. He states that this type of advertising, featuring one of your Facebook friends as the endorser of the product, is actually “less commercial” than a banner add from Bloomingdales. Some of the commentators on Techcrunch were less than understanding of big Zuck.

One of the contributers to the interview was a lady who is a columnist to a blog I refuse to link, but she called Mark a “toddler CEO.” I find this statement hilarious, arrogant, and right on! The fact that she had the audacity to call Mark Zuckerberg out, one of the most successful entrepreneurs of all time, is completely arrogant. She a columnist, he’s a billionaire… She’s going through menopause, he just went through puberty… Hmm, just a little arrogant? I think so.

With that being said, Mark does inherently lack experience being a CEO, did I mention he’s 23!!? I think it is perfectly understandable that he makes mistakes running a $15 Billion dollar company with 400 employees. While the “toddler CEO” statement is a little arrogant and derogatory, it does have some validity.

Mark has a lot to learn, but I think we (us non-CEO tycoons) have even more to learn from him! Even though Mr. Gates has valued the company at $15,000,000,000; the big Zuck has yet to develop an awesome monetization strategy while keeping all of his users happy.

One of the things Mark didn’t do, which surprised me, is sell Facebook to Yahoo! for $1 billion. The story goes that Mark actually initially accepted the offer from Yahoo! however, their CEO, reneged and offered only (haha) $800 million. Mark turned this offer down and then when Yahoo! came back a second time and returned to $1 billion, Zuckerberg convinced his board that it was a bad idea and Yahoo! was not serious about the acquisition, but rather more so in wasting their time.

If you haven’t checked out the interview make sure you do HERE!

So are you good enough? YES!

You can do anything that you put your mind to. If that is true, then why are there so many people who seem to drift through life aimlessly? In contrast, there are people who seem to get opportunities handed to them on a silver platter.

This is a question I often ask myself. In my experience it is mostly attitude that separates the two types of people. Some people get discouraged when others tell them that they can’t do something. Yet, the other people set out to prove that they indeed can do whatever they set out to do.

One other thing…

Those that set out to prove that they can do anything believe whole heartedly in themselves. In their mind there is little doubt of ability.

The ones that are drowned by their own sorrows, lack self confidence. They actually believe the people that say, “You can’t do that, you’re nobody.”

Never, ever, ever, listen to those people! Those are the same people who think that they can’t do it either.

Some people are gonna think you’re crazy!

The fact is that most people don’t live out their dream, they probably never even try. Why is that?! I want to know at what point and time do people stop reaching for the stars and go work at a job they hate for 40 years. At what stage in life do we give in to the criticism and lose the drive to be or do whatever we want, not what everyone else tells us we should be?

What are your opinions? Why do people stop dreaming? I have my own opinions but I would like to know your thoughts on the subject!

Congrats to Mr Gary Lee and Ms. Danielle for starting a new site! Watch the video to see who won Gary’s contest and about the new site they are starting.

We have got an absolutely outstanding team working toward one goal: exceed customer expectations.The customer absolutely has to come 1st.

I do regret not blogging however. Blogging is what started everything and opened our eyes to the possibilities. It is also, as I mentioned in a previous post, a huge stress reliever.

There is so much to share now and yet I have been blogging little. I really want to start blogging regularly again and I think we have the team put together well enough that I can start to do that.

What Do You Want to Know More About?

Right now is a pivotal point in my blog’s history, and I would like to know what you the readers would like to hear or know more about.

Please let me know!

Nate and Matt just released their new podcast about our investor situation and rational. Make sure you check it out!

Unique Blog Designs has consumed all of Nate, Matt, and I over the last several weeks. I thought some of you might want to know what has been going on with us.

Nate and I talk about start up expenses including getting an office and a booth at Blog World.

Enjoy!

PS Nate is going to be speaking on the topic of blog design at Blog World!

Click here to listen to my Podcast w/Nate

Make sure you check out my latest post on OnPulseIM Dot Com!

In my last post I wrote about our decision to begin hiring locally instead of outsourcing. So far it has been going better than originally expected.

Outsourcing is a big topic these days and understandably so. Outsourcing can provide cheaper labor than here in the US and often times the companies are highly qualified.

Our decision to NOT outsource is based on customer satisfaction.

When we make decisions, our customers are always at the forefront of our minds. What is best for our customers? How can we serve them better?

Often, designers and coders have extremely high rates and long turn around times. These two factors contribute to a lower number of individuals purchasing their services. I have dealt with this situation myself. I do not want to wait several months for a re-design on my blog. I also am not willing to pay thousands of dollars for one either.

We are offering our customers the best designs in the business (in my humble opinion), as well as an affordable pricing structure and extremely quick turn around times.

It is simply not possible for us to offer the same customer service oriented business philosophy with employees who we have difficulty communicating with. We want to make sure that our vision is crystal clear in the minds of each and every one of our employees.

In my previous post on this subject, I wrote that I have been using Monster.com to view resumes. This service is relatively expensive but well worth it in my opinion. Time is money and the ability for us to hire 5-10 qualified individuals inside of a month is awesome. Monster.com has provided a great service. Their business model is truly spectacular.

What we look for in an applicant

We are especially interested in an employee that has a firm grasp on what we are trying to accomplish. The employee must understand that we are set out to please each and every customer we have. Our goal is to have every customer be an advocate for our company. This will not happen unless everyone at our company is on the same page.

Have you ever been in a less than friendly office environment? I have and to say the least it is not a good situation. With that being said, we are looking for those individuals that get along well with us. We spend most (if not all) our waking time at work, therefore we find it especially important that the workplace is somewhere that we like going to. This means a courteous, friendly, and open environment.

We are Passionate about what we do!

We need our employees to also understand that this is not just a job for us, it is our livelihood. We are all very passionate about our business. The little things excite us; the number of orders per day, each new design, networking, etc. Every part of the business consumes us and we want our employees to share in this passion.

I guess you could say that we expect a lot from our employees. We recognize this and are willing to compensate them in the form of a profit sharing system. We acknowledge the fact that our employees are keys to the company’s success. Therefore our employees will most definitely be treated very, very well.

No one likes working for someone who doesn’t appreciate their efforts. This is not going to happen in our company. We would like to recognize accomplishments and rather than degrade someone for messing up we will simply learn from the experience and not make the same mistake.

What do you think? Are we ‘loco’ for hiring “expensive” labor?

Make sure you check out my new post on bloggingtips.com!

In my previous post about outsourcing, I exposed that my company and I are looking to outsource the development of a dynamic web application. Well, after consulting with our good friend Mitch Harper we have decided to go in another direction.

We are currently searching for employees here in the area of Phoenix, AZ. We are hiring designers/coders right now, and also searching for project managers.

We acknowledge the importance of hiring individuals with more experience and more talent than we have ourselves. This philosophy is adopted in order to grow our company as efficiently as possible.

If you are in the process of hiring local employees, I can suggest theses services we have used:

We paid for the ability to view the resumes on monster.com. This has proven to be the best avenue. I have found over 50 qualified candidates within 100 miles of me. This alone elevates my chances of finding great employees.

I have had no response from elance.com and just a couple from craigslist.com.

Our number one concern is, as it should be, our ability to take care of client’s requests. We are building our brand on exemplary and timely customer service. We always want to go the extra mile to ensure customer satisfaction.

We would like to instill this customer satisfaction oriented mindset in our employees.

Why We Decided to Stay Local Instead of Outsourcing

We are building long term relationships with both our customers and employees. In order to establish the kind of personal relationship we want, we are going to build our employee base here in Phoenix.

Our communication channels will have less resistance this way. Therefore, our goals and ideas will be implimented that much more effectively.

Every decision that is made has to be with the company in mind. We must always do what is best for our customers, and that will be better for our company.

I will keep you posted on our progress and helpful hints about the hiring process.

What are your helpful hints?

Did I hear correctly?

David Airey, a graphic designer from Northern Ireland with a love of great logos, is holding an anniversary prize giveaway. There’s more than $4,000 worth in free prizes! Find out how to enter by reading the details on David’s graphic design blog.

There are prizes from the likes of John Chow, Nate Whitehill with Unique Blog Designs, Maki from Dosh Dosh (one of my favorite blogs), Lyndon Antcliff of Cornwall SEO, and of course Darren Rouse otherwise known as Pro Blogger.

This is an awesome contest, so make sure you enter it! Thank you David for all the great info on your blog and all the great prizes!

If so I would like to hear about your experiences good and bad. I am in the process of handling some of the employment in our company. I would like to know some of the strategies you have used to seek new employees. We are using several forums as our main source of applicants.

What is your goal with your employees?

Do you own a Large or small business?

What are some of the good experiences you have had with the hiring process?

What are some of the ‘learning’ experience that have occurred?

Please let me know!

I am posting every Wednesday at BloggingTips.com.

Check out my first post!

let me know what you guys are thinking…

In this podcast I continue the discussion about how to get started investing. I uncover another reason why it is important to go see a financial advisor and also why it is important to be saving every month.

I hope you guys enjoy! Let me know if you have any suggestions, comments, or questions!

Thanks for listening

Podcast #3

I fell short of my goals for my blog in August. My biggest disappointment is that I didn’t hit my goal of 75 RSS subscribers. I am hovering around 55 subscribes with my peak number of subscribers being 59.

Most of the traffic I receive is from Nate. The problem, is that his readers are interested primarily on topics having to do with making money online. I don’t post about that topic often enough to retain as many of these readers as I would like.

So, what am I going to do?

It seems pretty obvious that I need to either try harder to network with self-development and finance blogs or re-focus my blog more on making money online. This way I will be able to use this experience to explain my tactics for seeking out and networking with bloggers in similar niches as myself.

I really try to post useful information on my blog. In order to do that I draw inspiration from my own experiences. Therefore, I am going to continue to network with more individuals who blog about the same topics I do.

In the mean time, I am exploring different ways to make money online using arbitrage, domain sales, paid posts, and involving myself in project management. After I have established some credibility in these areas and have useful information to share, I will post more often about them.

As for the rest of my goals

My second goal was to sell an advertising spot. I received several offers, none of which worked out for one reason or another. I am more concerned with the content and connections this blog brings me, not the revenue directly generated by it. Also, Google has not released the page rank, nor do I know for sure that they ever will.

I have decided to delay the launch of my finance site and series of free ebooks because of the release of John Chow’s new blog design that Nate did. Not to mention that in the same day Nate released Unique Blog Designs. A good marketer knows to not compete with his own brand! I would rather have our complete focus be on this project for now, and then later when my finance site and ebooks can have our full attention, I will release them.

There wasn’t all bad news for me and my goal’s. Matt and I did manage to finish the business plan. It was a lengthy project but worth the effort (more on this later).

I was also keep up on my reading. I will post about which books I read in a later post.

September Goals

1. Reach 75 readers.
2. Release 1 free financial ebook.
3. Development for outsourced project start.
4. Read 1 more internet marketing ebook.
5. Develop at least 1 new relationship with either a finance or personal development blog.

So here’s to a good month! How did you guys do?

I get asked quite often, “how do I get started with investing?”

There are different ways of getting started with investing. Most of the time what people are really asking is how to start saving money.

It is very difficult to get out of the habit of overextending yourself and living paycheck to paycheck.

Check the rest of the article on OnPulseIM Dot Com. I write a finance post there every Friday. If you havn’t checked it out yet, make sure you do!

One of the hottest topics I am reading about right now is outsourcing. Outsourcing everything.

Christine from CreateBusinessGrowth.com wrote an article on this topic called “Outsource Your Life and Free Yourself.” I am in the middle of developing an application for a new company we have. In order to do this we have been looking at five separate companies who will build it for us. I will talk more about each company in a follow up post after we have selected what company we are going with.

In a two part series I will detail exactly what I have learned from the experience.

In this first part I will talk about everything we have learned before we write the check.

-First of all, you need to know what you want. This is just a stating point. What you want and what can be done are often two separate things.

-After determining what you want, you will need to separate your features into what you absolutely must have to be successful and what can be left off until later. You want to do this because money often becomes an issue. This will enable you to get a bare bones estimate if necessary.

-At this point it is almost impossible to figure out what your break even is, so the next step is to find developers and figure out exactly how much your project is going to cost.

-Do a search for web developers. Research in depth 10 of them and choose 5 to move forward with. This will ensure or at least leverage you against these companies from trying to take advantage of you.

-Before calling or emailing the companies make sure you have a complete feature list put together as well as a great description of the final product. What happened to us is that with each company that we contacted, we learned a lot from each one. Therefore the interaction got easier with each contact.

-Make sure you take note of how well the interaction is with each contact. The company who ‘gets’ the concept the most may end up being the company you choose to develop the final product.

That’s all for now. I will follow up with a second post as soon as we are well into the development stage.

What has your experience been like?

One of the topics in the email was about Sprint/Nextel essentially firing 1,000 of its worst customer’s! I thought the article and the exlplanation tied in really well to my post on the 80/20 rule entitled, “Why it’s Okay to Turn Some Customers away.”

Check it out!

No Phone for You! Sprint-Nextel Cuts Off High-Maintenance Customers

What makes the biggest difference between companies that don’t succeed and those that do? This is a loaded question with infinite answers. However, my answer is relatively simple.

When you run a company, make sure that the goals of your customers and employees align with your goals for the company.

Sounds simple right?

It may be a concept which is easy to understand but is in direct conflict with the traditional way of doing business. The ‘old’ way of doing business is this: we make something, you buy it. In today’s world this is not a successful model anymore.

The customer dictates the success of the company. If the customer is not getting what he/she wants from your company, they have many other options.

So how do we compete?

It really is as simple as aligning the goals of your company with the wants and needs of your potential customer. In order to meet this objective you first need to find out who your ideal customer is and what he/she is looking for.

Lets say that you are starting a clothing company. You want to make clothes that are extravagant and expensive. Your potential customer wants clothes that are made in an environmentally friendly way. Do you think your clothing company is satisfying the needs, wants, and goals of the customer? The answer is no.

The customer’s goal is to purchase clothes that are manufactured in an environmentally safe way. Your company’s goals are to make extravagant clothing. There is a big disconnect here that will result in the company changing to meet customer’s demands or the company will fail.

This is pretty basic marketing theory.

Now where do your employees come into play?

Lets use the previous example, only this time your company’s goal is to make the most environmentally friendly clothing possible. Therefore your company’s goals are aligned with the customers. Super.

These same customers are highly educated young adults. They are courteous, fun-loving, and are willing to spend the money to buy what they want. However, they are not willing to shop at a store where there is a lot of high pressure sales. These customers want an environment that mimics their expectations of how people should act.

Well right now your employees in your store consist of really well spoken and pushy sales people. They are paid a small base salary combined with commission sales incentives. Again, this is a disconnect.

You have trained your employees to make sales and reward them for doing so in the form of a commission. This means that your employees goals are to make sales, that’s it. I am not in any way saying that commission sales jobs are bad. I have held three such positions. I am simply using this as an example to illustrate my point.

This situation is all too common. Your employee’s goals are to make sales and your customers goals are to purchase environmentally friendly clothing in an environment that reflects their own personalities.

If you were to instead hire employees with the same goals as the customers, things would be different. Hire employees that are chiefly concerned with the environment and pay them not on the number of sales but just on salary, and maybe incentivise them using outside activities.

For example, in this case, what if you paid your employees a commission for going to an environmental meeting, or to get involved in an environmental charity. Don’t you think that your customers, the ones who care about the environment, would recognize this and say, “this is a company that satisfies my needs, I want to buy my clothing exclusively form them.”

Maybe the customers wouldn’t say EXACTLY that, but you are aligning the goals of your customers with your employees and also with your company’s goals. This is the new model of doing business and really one of the only ways your company is going to succeed in a hyper-competitive market!

For a busy Saturday, (yes I work weekends too) I decided to link up some of my favorite posts of the week. There is some really useful information contained in these posts, so make sure you read up!

Link up a competitor at Problogger - as always Darin gives us some of the best blogging info found on the ‘net

In it for the long haul? buy! at Pro Money Blog - if you enjoy my blog you will also enjoy his

Finance Friday at On Pulse IM - great blog started by a great guy, I do a guest post here every Friday. This one is called ‘Get Rich Guaranteed.’

Unique Blog Designs Congrats Nate! - Christine gives some appreciation for Nate

Does blog design really matter? - An awesome video post by the one and only Yaro Starak

What were some of your favorite posts of the week?

We spend most of our time and money trying to attract new customers. So why on earth would anyone want to turn away any paying customer?

Ever heard of the 80/20 rule?

Generally, businesses receive 80 percent of their revenue from 20 percent of their customers. They also say that companies spend 80 percent of their time on the customers that make them the least amount of money.

What does this all mean?

This means if we spent all of our time on the 20% that were the most profitable, we would actually spend less time with customers and increase our margin.

Sounds pretty good to me. Working less and earning more.

This also means that it can sometimes be a good idea to tell some customers that they should go somewhere else. I learned this concept very well being in the banking industry.

A part of being licensed requires that you make smart and well suited investment decisions for people or you can go to jail or get fined. For example, you wouldn’t put all of a retired person’s money in a single growth stock and you probably wouldn’t put a very young person’s money in long term cd’s. So if a customer ever came in requesting to make an extremely unsuitable investment decision I would kindly tell them the reasons that I cannot make the trade or the investment, and explain to them that other institutions would be better suited for this particular trade.

Ideal Customers and Email Lists

It is important to be able to recognize who your ideal customers are and focus on them. Doing plenty of research to find what their demographics and purchasing habits are is well worth it. This is especially useful if you are working on a limited budget. You can keep your costs down and maximize your effectiveness and marketing.

This is why having e-mail lists are so important and developing one asap is completely necessary, no matter what stage of the game you are in and no matter how many customers or readers you come in contact with. E-mail subscribers are often very concentrated customers ,and are probably your ideal customers.

So find out who your most profitable customers are and go after them!

Thanks for the questions and interest last time. In this podcast I cover some of the basics and fundamentals of investing. I will get more specific next time. This one is for all of you who don’t even know where to get started.

I also include a clue as to what the big announcement is tomorrow!

Enjoy!

Podcast #2